Kenyan court charges cult leader Paul Mackenzie over 52 more deaths

Mackenzie has been charged with organised criminal activity, radicalisation, and facilitating ‘terrorism’.

A Kenyan self-proclaimed preacher and seven others linked to an infamous doomsday cult have been charged over the deaths of dozens of people whose bodies were discovered in shallow graves in southeast Kenya last year.

Kenya’s public prosecutions office said in a statement on X on Wednesday that it had charged Paul Mackenzie and other defendants with “organized criminal activity, two counts of radicalization (and) two counts of facilitating commission of a terrorist act” in relation to the “deaths of at least 52 people at Kwa Binzaro area in Chakama, Kilifi County.”

The defendants pleaded not guilty, with the next hearing in the case due on March 4.

“They are alleged to have promoted an extreme belief system by preaching against the authority of the government, adopted an extreme belief system against authority, and facilitated the commission of a terrorist act,” the prosecutor’s office said.

Mackenzie and others were already facing charges including murder and “terrorism” in connection with the deaths ⁠of people whose bodies were exhumed earlier from Shakahola Forest, in one of the world’s biggest cult-related disasters in recent history.

Prosecutors say Mackenzie and his Good News International Church organised a cult in which they ordered followers to starve themselves and their ‌children to death to go to heaven before the world ended. Mackenzie has denied the accusations.

By 2025, two years after investigations began, prosecutors said more than 400 bodies had been recovered from Shakahola Forest, which is located in Kilifi County on Kenya’s east coast.

Autopsies revealed that the majority had died of hunger. But others, including children, appeared to have been strangled, beaten or suffocated.

Mackenzie pleaded not guilty to multiple counts of manslaughter at a first trial in Mombasa and has remained in custody ever since.

But last year, more bodies were discovered in the remote village of Kwa Binzaro, around 30km (20 miles) from Shakahola along the Indian Ocean coast.

Prosecutors say Mackenzie masterminded and oversaw the offences at Kwa Binzaro, continuing to direct them after his detention in 2023 and using methods that included radical teachings to draw victims to the remote site.

The grisly case has led the Kenyan government to flag the need for tighter control of fringe denominations in the majority-Christian country. Separate reports by the Senate of Kenya and a state-funded human rights watchdog also said the authorities could have prevented the deaths.